


The Face In The Mirror Is Not My Own

by AnonymousPumpkin



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Dissociation, Memory Loss, Multi, Not really a character study, Semi Canon-Compliant, There are technically relationships but, Vinh Shepard, not tagging them anymore, this focuses more on vinh's feeling about the relationships than the ships themselves so
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-18
Updated: 2016-05-28
Packaged: 2018-05-27 10:04:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6280210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnonymousPumpkin/pseuds/AnonymousPumpkin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything was wrong. There were parts missing, parts filled in where they oughtn’t be, and subtle changes in her expression, in her eyes, that made it wrong. It was like the self you saw in a dream. You knew it was you, but it was just wrong enough that you couldn’t believe it. You couldn’t connect to it.</p><p>Vinh Shepard in moments of reflection as she struggles to reconcile the life she remembers with the life she has. Non-linear one-shots mostly placed during the Mass Effect 2.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Face In The Mirror Is Not My Own

**Author's Note:**

> I found this while digging through my Mass Effect folder trying to find something else entirely. Figured, what the hell. It's finished. Might as well post it. Based off a prompt I got so long ago that I have definitely forgotten it. Not really a character study or anything like that, just...a little bitty take on what I think Shepard might have gone through after being, you know. Forcibly resurrected. A little peek into my own Shepard's backstory, which I have lovingly crafted while ignoring like 75% of presented canon.

The woman in the mirror was unrecognizable. Oh, the features were correct: the gaunt, sharp cheeks and the firm, downturned mouth and the thin, curved nose. Her brown hair was curling as it started, very slowly, to dry. Her eyes seemed unnaturally pale, especially in the dim light. Her skin was brown and freckled and not at all smooth. If she were to describe in detail the woman in the mirror, the description would match that of her own face. 

And yet everything was wrong.  _ Everything _ . There were parts missing, parts filled in where they oughtn’t be, and subtle changes in her expression, in her eyes, that made it wrong.

The scar that split her eyebrow from the grenade on Akuze, the one that marked her chin from the bar fight on the  _ Killough _ ...they were both gone, replaced by strange holes in her skin that shimmered faintly like she had fire under her skin. Her shoulders looked  _ bare _ without the splashes of color she’d acquired, the bold spirals, stars, and lines. The slight curve of her nose from several many breaks: gone. The dip in her jaw from when she clipped it falling from a tree: gone. Every scar that made her  _ her _ was gone. It threw her off to be  _ slightly _ wrong. It was like the self you saw in a dream. You knew it was you, but it was just wrong enough that you couldn’t believe it. You couldn’t connect to it.

The air outside the bathroom was chilly. She drifted uncertainly towards the small closet that had been provided her, but her stomach clenched when she saw the Cerberus logo emblazoned on every breast and sleeve. The symbol inspired anger in her, a vengeful rage and a venereal desire that made her hands shake and her head swim. Some of her memories were still unclear, but the emotions were strong. She remembered bodies, lifeless and still, with that logo on their breast, and felt a sick satisfaction that made her want to vomit. She had  _ enjoyed _ killing them. It made her sick to think of wearing that symbol.

Taylor was certain that she was the same woman, and for the most part she felt like she must have been. But her body moved faster now, smoother. There were blank spaces in her mind, gaping holes where memories should have been, where associations should’ve made sense. She shied away unconsciously from some memories, only able to recall them when she wasn’t trying. She remembered her life, all her glories and failures, as if she had been read it from a book. The words were there but faces were gone, scents and scenes and symbols. No memory came to her exactly she wanted it. Something was always missing, something was always muddled.

No...that was wrong. Mostly it wasn’t, but it was  _ partly _ wrong.

One memory came to her readily, though it was mundane and simple. She remembered sitting, Tali, Ashley, and her, on her bed on the SR1. That bed had been harder, smaller, but she adored it. It was after some mission on a desert planet; she was complaining about sand under her armor, Tali was poking fun at her… They were surrounded by holos and paper photographs she had taken from her belongings, laughing and reminiscing and comparing life stories. There was a bottle of cheap, nameless alcohol between them, which Tali declined to partake in. Vinh had let her hair down because she still felt uncomfortable from being planetside, and Ashley had let her hair down because Vinh had. Tali had been amazed by the photographs, caressing their wrinkles and creased corners. Paper photographs had been out of style for a century almost, and one could barely find any planetside, let alone in space. Vinh had taken almost religious care of them, and despite their age, some of them still shone.

“They’re my Mę’s,” she’d explained, with no small amount of pride. “She’s interested in antique machines and old technology.” She’d grinned. “You’d like her. She’s all about restoring old tech.”

She leaned in, pushed a photograph closer to Ashley. “See that? Look familiar?”

Ashley’s face had lit up and Tali had made some small noise of wonder, and her chest had filled with warmth and light…

With the memory came a strong urge, a desire to hold those photographs, to look at those holos again. Surely...surely somewhere in them was the answer to the wordless question that burned in her. She’d been collecting them, she remembered with some effort, since she had enlisted. Every year, her Mę sent a new batch, of Altair and the rest of the family and the places they visited. She had so many she wasn’t even sure she’d seen all of them by the time she…

Those photographs were probably gone. The realization was like a punch in the  gut. The first Normandy hadn’t been recovered, and the fire would have destroyed the paper. But surely…the holos…?

She didn’t even bother dressing. Vinh gripped her towel with a shaking hand and sank into the chair...literally. It was so soft that for a moment she wasn’t sure what to do. The faint blue light of the fish tank light the scant scattering of items on the desk: the terminal where she (occasionally) checked messages, the holo of Liara (a thoughtful gesture, she was almost convinced, and not a vindictive  one), the datapads staring at her with half-finishing administrative desk work she dreaded. She turned on the terminal and tried to access her personal files. Her official files had been destroyed or passed on or archived, but all of her personal collections, she prayed, were still intact.

After several hours of frustrated key-mashing and cursing, she found them, with EDI’s help. Most of her files, she found, were gone, but the photos were, by some miracle, mostly there. They were protected by some archaic firewall that the Alliance systems didn’t know how to handle. She thanked her past self, whoever that woman had been, for having such forethought. She pulled the images up almost desperately. They spanned back years, from her childhood almost until her…

She was immediately struck by how sickeningly  _ unfamiliar _ these holos were.  These were her memories, her family, and she didn’t know them. She scrolled through them with a feverish panic, almost too quickly to get a good look. They were nothing but a blur at first; a series of places she didn’t immediately recognize, of people she couldn’t immediately name. Her chest ached from the force of her heart beating, and her head began to swim. Panic began to set in, doubt that she had been barely suppressing.

_ Wait...wait… _ Her eye caught on one image, and there was a stirring in her abdomen that was almost knowing.

The house was very small, and festivity seemed to spill from its windows and doors in the form of bright streamers, flowers, and banners. At least twenty people were crammed onto the tiny porch, sitting on bannisters and steps and each other’s laps. Young children leaned out of the windows and sat on their father’s shoulders. Everyone laughed, dark eyes twinkling. In the sea of faces was a woman. She stood out from the crowd because her skin was darker and her bearing was different, obviously military. She had very gaunt cheeks and a downturned mouth, stiff shoulders and a proud chin. She was standing in the center of the group, flanked by two women who could only be her mothers. She was still wearing her uniform and she had a young boy balanced on her hip.

_ That’s me _ . That was a younger, happier self...but it was  _ her _ self nonetheless.

She found her lips moving as she picked out faces in the crowd as she plucked random, previously faceless facts from her mind. That little girl with the pigtails hated pork. The woman with the red shirt had been married four times. The woman to her right was allergic to her dogs, and the man to her left hated orange juice. With some struggle she managed to call forth their names as well. Cúc, Hoa, Liên, Văn. She remembered more, then. She remembered singing songs and cooking meals and watching fireworks and dances.

This holo had been taken two...no... _ four  _ years ago now. She had gone home for Tết...it was the first she’d been able to go home for in two years. It was her son’s first time seeing the entire family, and he had been so excited he’d seemed to vibrate on the trip home. She’d been so tired that first day back that she wasn’t sure how she’d made it through the door, but she had felt so indescribably happy, so content to finally be home. She’d come early to help prepare, and to let Altair get accustomed to being around so many people at once. Her mothers had been ecstatic to see her, and one or both were always at her hip.

She’d hoped for some kind of explosive effect, that one photograph would open the floodgates in her mind and the identity she had been searching for would come rushing back to her. But there was no such luck. The memories felt forced and artificial in her mind, remembered either in too much clarity or far too little. Every photograph required the same arduous journey of self-discovery. She kept scrolling back until she found something she had thought long gone: her recruitment photo. The photo made her strangely conscious of her _age_ , of how much time had passed from that day...and of what a life she’d had. She almost didn’t even recognize the woman...the _girl_ that she had been. The Shepard who half-smiled at the camera looked so tragically young..far older than her years, perhaps, but eons younger still than...whoever she was now. This child, this younger and more hopeful Shepard had _seen_ death in passing, but she had not yet tasted it. She even saw it in more recent photos. Even as her heart grew harder and bigger and stronger, she was still so naive and innocent, _ignorant_ to the horror she would experience. In a way, they were not the same woman at all. They couldn’t be. Shepard had been Beyond, to the places where her ancestors lived, and she had been ripped back again, and she had been changed for it. No one else saw it, or if they saw, they did not speak it. There was a mark on her soul like a burn, a darkness in her eyes that spoke volumes silently.

She lost track of how long she sat there, half-naked, scrolling through old holos, strenuously recovering herself. It must have been hours; she was roused from the stupor she’d fallen into by a shrill beep from her terminal, alerting her to Miranda’s increasingly-insistent demands for her attention, which apparently had gone unheeded for several minutes. She stood quickly and dressed quickly, pulling the soft Cerberus uniform over her aching skin. What light she cast on the room from her scars was extinguished, and with it, she put away her anxiety. Whoever she was, Shepard or some strange  _ other  _ thing, the galaxy was depending on her, and she had no time to stare in the mirror and wonder.


	2. This Heart In My Chest Doesn't Beat Like It Should, Part I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vinh ponders the difference between loving someone in memory and loving someone in earnest.

There was a picture on the desk. She saw it every time she entered her quarters, as it was placed in a spot that was impossible to miss, and was colorful enough to draw her eye immediately. It got lost sometimes in the piles of datapads and ration bar wrappers and empty boxes that once held model ships, but it always emerged from the clutter, too bright. She didn’t remember taking that picture, or ever owning that picture, but she thought perhaps she must have. Or perhaps this was another case of Lawson attempting to be _helpful_. There was little precedent for how to restore the memories of the dead, and she supposed holos of people in her past was as good a guess as any.

Sometimes she caught herself staring at it when she stepped out of the shower, wishing she could conjure up _some_ kind of feeling except a detached kind of affection and a gut-wrenching guilt.

It was a picture of a woman she knew, a woman that she knew distantly that she must have loved, because she vaguely remembered one night, a desperate, hopeful night, where they kissed and tangled together. She didn’t remember what it felt like, what it sounded like, or even really what it looked like. She didn’t remember it as a memory, precisely, but rather as a fact. She remembered it the same way you would remember a movie if it had only ever been described to you by someone else, or the way you would remember an important event in history after reading in a book. One night two years ago, she whispered “I love you” into Liara T’soni’s collar, cradled in the warmth of their biotics. This she knew for a fact.

She avoided that picture, those memories. Every time she caught herself staring, longing, she forced herself to turn away. It was unfair, she felt, to even _think_ about wanting something she didn’t even fully remember.

Meeting the woman in question, as it turned out, was more of a hindrance than a help. Part of her was unsurprised to learn Liara had become an information broker, but for the most part she just felt a bit bemused. Everyone she met between her and T’soni’s office told her how happy Liara would be to see her, how long she had been waiting, how well she was doing. She tried to match all of that to what she knew, what she felt.

The half-memories Shepard had rolling around in her head didn’t match at all with the woman in front of her. The image matched, the words matched, the tone of voice evoked something that could be described as horrified recognition, but the name that her mind supplied wasn’t right. Not entirely. She entered Liara’s office with an unpleasant chill at the base of her spine and terror in her gut that she swallowed easily. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to run or shoot her or embrace her.

Given that those were the only options she considered, it felt oddly natural to reach out her hands, lace their fingers together, and allow herself to get lost in the kiss.

When she closed her eyes, she could remember the two of them sitting in Liara’s lab late at night, her listening to Liara talk about her research and pretending to understand. When their lips brushed she remembered comforting Liara after her mother’s death (her mother’s death at Shepard’s hand, a fact that horrified her less than it ought), the first time they embraced, the first time she pressed her lips to the young woman’s temple. When they pulled apart, she remembered turning around and seeing Liara dressed in full armor, surrounded by fire, running away away away.

Liara’s face closed off as soon as they pulled apart, and her eyes darted to the side in an unspoken signal. They were being watched. As always, she thought.

(She noted with no small amount of amusement that, despite their attachment, Liara calls her ‘Shepard.’)

“It’s good to see you too, Liara,” she said, and it wasn’t a lie.

Part of her wanted to, but she knew better than to ask Liara to come with her. She knew it was too good to be true, and she knew she would fuck it up if she tried to reach for what they’d had before. Instead, she offered to help her if she needed it, because she knew that Liara knew that that was the kind of woman she was. It felt natural to slide into that particular groove, helping someone while she accomplished her own goals. She took on as many errands as possible, from Liara as well as anyone else she happened to come across, and found it far easier to juggle the needs of those around her than the scattered memories in her own head.

It didn’t help that Liara had…changed. Not that Tali hadn’t, or that Garrus hadn’t, or that being surrounded by strangers wasn’t still disconcerting. But something had happened to Liara that had changed her as deeply as death had changed Shepard. It took several visits, several favors, and some brusque questioning Shepard would only later realize was tactless and cruel (another habit of hers, she was learning; social cues, no matter the species, were not her strong suit).

Liara’s admission didn’t hurt as deeply as it could have. Shepard was still struggling to reconcile this hard, bitter woman in front of her with the soft, bright explorer that laughed and floated at the edge of her dreams, so it was easy to shrug off the bitter bile of betrayal when Liara admitted she sold Shepard’s _corpse_ to the very people who were responsible for ruining her life. It was easier to slip into her familiar robes of compassionate warrior, assuring Liara in no uncertain terms that she held no grudge, that she _understood_ what it meant to make a tough call with so much on the line.

As she left the office for the final time, she wondered if Liara could tell. Sometimes there was a shrewd sadness in her eyes, and Shepard wondered if something showed in her face. Guilt ate at her, making her feet drag and her hands clench, and she wanted to turn around, tell Liara she was sorry, even if she wasn’t entirely sure what she was apologizing for.

It felt good to throw herself into battle. Battle was familiar. Fighting was familiar. No matter what happened, it seemed to be a constant in her life. Even if the people at her back weren’t precisely like she remembered them (Mordin took some getting used to, but she knew right way that she liked him), her heart sang with the rush of her biotics and her body responded with delight to the onslaught of enemies. A fight was a fight, whether you were you or something else.

Memories came easier, she found, when she wasn’t hunting for them. As she slammed an asari mercenary back against the far wall, she remembered the first time Liara said her first name, whispering it against the back of her wrist again and again, testing it and perfecting it before she allowed herself to say it at a conversational volume. As she let out a roar and threw herself into the nearest group of enemies, preparing to make herself vulnerable for the chance at a few seconds of adrenaline and danger, she was thinking about one time she and Liara trekked for miles across a lush jungle planet in search of a Prothean artifact, and how she’d gotten so caught up in the sound of Liara’s voice as she explained the potential significance of their find that she nearly walked right off a cliff. She laughed as Garrus whooped in triumph, and remembered the time Liara had to lift him with her biotics up to a third story window, and the way he’d screamed at a pitch she hadn’t even know was physically possible.

She went back to the Normandy, exhausted and with two new allies in tow, and she went straight to her chambers. She looked up and she saw the picture on the desk. She shed her armor in the short distance between the door and her chair, and she fell heavily into it, never once taking her eyes from Liara’s face.

She took the picture to bed, curled up in a mound of thin blankets and pillows (she knew she could afford to indulge herself in something more comfortable, but something always stopped her), held the picture to her chest, and just waited. She waited for something to click. For something to happen. For her mind and her heart to come together and reach an agreement. She spent most of the night waiting, and then she fell asleep.

The next morning, she got up and took a shower. The glow of her implants illuminated the dark room and cast her face in a sinister orange light. She pulled on the same jacket she had worn the day before, the only one that didn’t have the Cerberus logo sewn into the breast. She found the picture in the tangled mess of her bed and she put it back on the desk, face down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. I'm not sure why this isn't a one-shot anymore. I started writing for something else last night, and it turned into...this. I may write more of these, I may not. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
> 
> This is mostly just an explanation as to why my Shepard romanced a different person every game lol


End file.
